


Contemporary Analyses of Speculative Fiction

by sleepy_santiago



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Doctor Who Fusion, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Doctor Who References, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Libraries, M/M, Outer Space, Slice of Life, farmer!troy, librarian!abed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27109396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepy_santiago/pseuds/sleepy_santiago
Summary: Troy is a farmer who grows and harvests stories on his home planet, Wistor. Abed is a bookbinder who lives in a library outside of time and space. They're in love.Barely set in the Doctor Who universe - there are references, but it's really just for the whimsy! No Doctor Who knowledge needed.
Relationships: Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Comments: 17
Kudos: 65





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biggod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggod/gifts), [truestrepairman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/truestrepairman/gifts).



> this one's for cherry and arithmetic!
> 
> mari, thank you for the beta! <3

_A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient._

\- Ursula Le Guin

* * *

_A tower. A gunfight. A masked hero._

Troy reluctantly pulled his fingers from the curling tendrils of the inch-tall seedling. The story growing in the soil, the story he’d planted weeks ago, wasn’t ready yet. He had a good feeling about this one, though. He usually did, with all of the thousands of stories he’d planted in his twenty-three years of life. 

He dusted his hands on his coveralls and grinned. The afternoon Wistorian sun shone bright today, setting a field of glittering tales alight. Each called to him in voices more beguiling than the last.

Troy couldn’t wait to harvest every one of them— that was his favourite part.

There was no one way to harvest a story. You had to listen to the story and allow it to tell you how it wanted to be taken. It’d taken his parents years to perfect this skill, but Troy had mastered it in three months as a teenager.

Some stories preferred to be bottled into cork-stoppered vials. Some liked to be wrapped in a piece of silk and tied with twine. Some, so vibrant and bursting with life, would only survive outside of the earth if you trapped it inside an aluminum-lined pillbox. Those stories stung if you held them for too long.

Every month on harvest day, Troy wheeled a cart of freshly harvested stories to the dock of Wistor, his home planet, boarded the _X7 Dimensionizer_ , and shuttled off to deliver them to the library. There, the stories would undergo a rigorous process where they were carefully extracted, sewn into book covers, painted, stamped, and made ready to be pulled off shelves and thumbed through.

Today was one of those days. Troy moved on from the seedling to a fully grown specimen. 

“Hello, beautiful,” Troy crooned, running his fingers along its broad, flat contours. Instantly, he felt almost dizzy with romanticism. This was a legend of love and triumph, of a knight who collected broken hearts and a maiden who mended them. 

Troy closed a velvet-lined box around the story and snapped the bronze latch into place. Nothing compared to stories in their raw form, but they weren’t meant to be used that way. Troy’s Mom and Pops had taught him the first rule of the trade at the age of six: never stay with one story for too long. Instead of you consuming the story, the story would consume you.

The box went onto Troy’s cart, on top of an already teetering pile of clay pots, glass bottles, fabric bundles, and paper packages. The cart rolled down the lane at his behest, wheels rattling by his side. A ten-minute walk past rolling hills dotted with flourishing myths and groves of swaying fables brought them to Wistor’s dock. 

Wistor’s dock was a steep drop of cliff overlooking an ocean of roiling clouds. At the lip of the cliff, a bulky silver spaceship hovered with its side door open and its ramp spilling onto the rocky surface. 

“Go on,” Troy prompted his cart. It trundled happily forward, onto the ramp, and into the _X7 Dimensionizer_. 

Before Troy boarded, he appraised his own reflection in the shiny hull of the spaceship. He smoothed his coarse eyebrows, checked his teeth, and straightened the collars of his shirt. His heart thumped against his chest. No need to be anxious, Troy told himself, he was only going to see the librarian, after all. The same tall, handsome librarian he’d been seeing every week since he started doing deliveries six years ago.

Nobody occupied the pristine white seats lining the _Dimensionizer_ ’s interior. With such a sparsely populated planet as Wistor (Troy’s parents lived on the other side of the planet, and only a few other residents inhabited the space between them), Troy was usually the only passenger on flights to and from Wistor.

The ramp rose and slid the spaceship’s entrance shut.

~

Abed groaned and whipped off his glasses. The story lying in front of him squirmed on the spine of the open book cover he had placed it upon. 

“It won’t take much longer if you just behave,” Abed said sternly. The story heaved and then slackened. He slid the glasses back on. Thin wire frames hugged two rounded chips of smoky quartz that formed the lenses. Abed twirled the pair of needle-thin tweezers in his hand and leaned over the book again. 

With the story finally cooperating, Abed made short work of binding the book. Within an hour, he held in his hands a slim volume with an amethyst cover. He stroked the spine, on which he’d painted the title of the book: _THE PHANTOM OF LA-ROCHE-EN-ARDENNE_. Abed adored ghost stories — especially those involving love. Something about the yawning chasm between life and death the echoed chords of yearning just right. 

A chime like sharp rain against glass roused Abed from his absentminded appreciation of the newly bound book. Someone was waiting at the library’s entrance.

Of course — delivery day.

Abed scrambled to round the corner of his desk, then realized that he still held the book, then realized that he still wore his bookbinding glasses when he set down the book beside his regular glasses. He stuffed the little smoky-quartz pair into his breast pocket and squashed a wider pair with a sturdy ebony frame and clear lenses onto his face.

It took Abed a few minutes to find his way to the front entrance of the library. Of course, he’d placed his desk as close to the door as he could get it, but a library that existed outside of time and space had the tendency to shift and stretch and roll itself into different positions overnight. Abed waded between oakwood shelves, scampered over plush green carpets, and skidded through an open-air reading nook where the Helix Nebula whirled above, its red eye burning down out of a swirling green cloud.

Before he opened the ornate wooden door, Abed smoothed down his collar and adjusted his glasses. He breathed out and pulled the door open.

“Abed!” Troy Barnes retained every ounce of the enthusiasm he’d had at their first meeting, when Troy was only sixteen and bouncing off the walls, barely able to keep his cartload of stories from crashing onto the colourful tiles of the library’s entrance hall. “How long has it been since we saw each other?”

“A month. You come every month,” Abed reminded Troy. He tugged Troy’s cart through the door and stepped aside to allow it to roll around the hall on its own.

“For me, it’s been a month. What about you?” Troy’s gentle eyes skated over Abed’s face, as if he could assess for himself how much Abed had aged in Troy’s absence.

“Hmm, about five months. And a fortnight,” said Abed. Not that Troy would be able to tell otherwise. Like the library, Abed wasn’t bound by time or space. Nor was his body.

“Any visitors in between?” Troy sounded casual, but his eyes slid to Abed even as he pretended to appraise a stack of magazines by the wall.

“No. Just the man with the blue police box again. He came for tea, like he said he would.” Abed waved for Troy to follow him and they set off toward the library’s heart.

“I wish I could meet him sometime,” Troy sighed. “Will you tell me the story about the first time he came again? About the girl from Earth? And the war with the Daleks?” He reached out to brush his fingers against the spines of the books on the shelves as he walked past them.

Abed chuckled. “I’ve already told you that story a thousand times.”

“And I never get tired of it.”

“Anyways, we’re here for _your_ stories.” Abed parted a set of weighty velvet curtains between two towering mahogany shelves and slipped inside. Troy and his cart followed.

Inside the dark room, harvested stories in their various containers sat on shelves mounted on the wall and on tables scattered around the space. Stories curled up in transparent bottles, jars, and bags cast the dark room in a dim glow.

Troy began unloading his cart onto an empty table in front of him. 

“So, I guess it’s been a pretty lonely five months, huh?” he asked.

Abed shrugged. “I’m used to it. Libraries that don’t technically exist usually don’t get many patrons.” In fact, Abed saw an average of two patrons every thousand years. This millennium, both had been the Doctor with his strange blue box. 

“I’m having a party this weekend,” Troy said.

“A party? On Wistor?” Abed snorted.

“Hey, community is very important to us Wistorians,” Troy said. “We like to stay connected to each other.”

“You don’t talk to anyone on that planet but your parents.”

Troy deflated. “Okay. You got me. The party’s just me. And you. If you’ll come.” He looked up at Abed through a thick fan of lashes. His dark eyes glinted in the light of bottled tales.

Abed looked down and fiddled with a porcelain jar. “I can’t leave the library.”

“Sure you can. It’ll be okay for a night. Like you said — no one ever comes anyway.”

“You don’t understand.” Abed had never known anything but the library. Safe within her walls, Abed could traverse galaxies, slay dragons, and fall in love. He could live a million lives. He could map out the universe in stars when he looked out the windows. He belonged here, not out there. Abed’s fingers tightened around the jar. 

A warm hand covered Abed’s.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to.” Troy paused. He retracted his hand. “I’m sorry.”

Abed turned away and started shelving the stories. After a brief moment of silence, the clatter and scrape of pots and boxes against the tabletop resumed as Troy went back to unloading.

“This one’s my favourite out of this month’s harvest,” said Troy. He held up a wooden box with a bronze latch. 

“What’s it about?” Abed took the box.

“See for yourself.”

Abed flipped the latch and opened the box. His fingertips trailed in the story’s beckoning whorls. He gasped. The knight and his string of broken hearts seared themselves across Abed’s brain like a brand. 

He closed the box.

“Alright, well, that’s the last of it.” Troy shifted on his feet. “Goodbye, until next month.”

Abed watched as Troy and his cart disappeared between the winding shelves. Who knew when they’d see each other again? For Abed, it could be within the next day or the next hundred years.

The brokenhearted knight dug his spurred heels into Abed’s frontal cortex. Abed groaned and rubbed his forehead. Curse his sensitivity to stories.

Abed broke into a run. He didn’t see Troy in the Romance section or the Earth History section, so he retraced their steps from the front entrance, peering into each lantern-lit alleyway and corridor for any sign of the man and the cart. 

Abed burst into the entrance hall as the door creaked open.

“Wait!” Abed panted.

Troy halted, halfway out the door. He gave Abed a questioning glance over his shoulder.

“I’ll come with you,” said Abed. “Let me come with you.”

~

“I’ve never been in a spaceship before.” Abed turned on the spot, gazing around the _X7 Dimensionizer_ ’s cabin. 

Troy flopped into one of the white seats. “Not once in your long, long life?”

“Not once.” Abed had been in many spaceships in many stories. Just not his story. His skin prickled with goosebumps. 

When they docked, the _Dimensionizer_ ’s ramp descended and revealed a cotton-candy sunset reflected in the pearly clouds that swirled just past Wistor’s cliff. 

Abed couldn’t move for a second, so enraptured he was by the warmth of the air on his skin. 

Troy squeezed Abed’s wrist and released it. “Let’s go. My house is a short walk from here.”

Abed didn’t budge.

“Or...you could ride in the cart.”

Troy set off walking down the road with Abed folded up into the cart beside him. They rolled down the lane for about five minutes before Abed clambered back out, eager to feel the rocks beneath the soles of his shoes.

“That’s the forest where I used to find the loveliest ballads.” Troy pointed to the right. “In fact — wait right here.” He bounded into the thicket, leaving Abed nonplussed and blinking by the side of the road. Within a few seconds, Troy returned with a small wax-sealed bottle in hand. He tucked it into his breast pocket.

Troy’s home lay at the end of the road. More of a cottage than a house, it had a trellis on its left side, a cherrywood door with a brass knocker, and round windows. A chirping twilight had fallen over Wistor; the lanterns and fireplace Troy lit inside crackled and danced in the windows’ glass.

The meal they shared was hearty and the wine sweet. They sat, curled, on the rug by the fireplace when they finished eating. Troy pointed out the window. 

“Do you see the stars?”

“Every day.” Abed nodded.

“Wistorians have this myth. One of the only ones we’ve got that hasn’t come out of the soil.” Troy scooted over to the window and inched it open. The night air spilled in. In the velvet sky, stars blinked. “We say that the stars were the first stories. That they are nothing but a slow, faraway rain of stories and at nighttime when the closest ones finally reach Wistor, they sink into the ground and plant themselves and grow into the things we harvest our tales from.”

Abed joined Troy and hooked his chin over the windowsill. The breeze chilled his wine-warmed skin. Starlight illuminated half of Troy’s face, the other half bronze in firelight. “That’s beautiful.”

“You aren’t looking at the stars,” Troy chuckled.

Abed shrugged. He didn’t need to. He’d been looking at the stars his whole life. He only got to see Troy once every few weeks, months, years. Who knew when Troy would come knocking again, once Abed returned to the library? No, Abed would much rather keep his gaze where he’d chosen to fix it.

“Of course, now we know that stars don’t rain down on the planet.” Troy swirled the dregs of his wine in the bottom of his glass. “But I still think the tale is worth telling. I mean, most of these stars are hundreds of years into the future, aren’t they?” He gestured widely at the night sky. “We’re just seeing memories of starlight. Stories of fire.”

“What’s your favourite story?” Abed asked.

“I don’t have one,” Troy said bashfully. “I mean, I don’t think I could choose one if I could. But, also...I’ve only ever handled stories in their pure form. And you know how you’re not supposed to take them in like that.”

“So you’ve never read a story in full?” The notion boggled Abed’s mind. Then again, Abed could remember the way Troy touched and looked at the books in the library when he visited — like he was a pedestrian outside a shop window and they were jewels he longed to wreathe around his neck.

Troy shook his head.

“We’ll have to change that,” Abed decided.

~

Unlocking the library’s front door and slipping inside felt like a secret. Like Abed was sneaking into his house past some sort of curfew and he’d broken some kind of rule. 

“This way,” Abed murmured — it suddenly felt necessary to speak in low voices. 

Troy and Abed padded amongst the shadows thrown by the towering bookshelves. From behind him, Abed could hear the whisper of Troy’s fingertips sliding across the spines of books.

“Where are you taking me?” Troy asked. 

“In here.” Abed disappeared between the curtains of the room that held the harvested stories. Troy followed. 

Abed strode over to a shelf on the far wall and tapped his nail against his chin as he surveyed the clutter of containers on the shelf until he found what he sought. He pulled the wooden box down and set it on the table. 

“You said this was your favourite?” Abed opened the box. The story of the knight with the broken hearts curled inside.

“Of this batch, yeah.” Troy sat on a stool across the table.

Abed rummaged around in a cabinet. Tweezers, needle, thread… He just needed… Ah! Abed reached into his breast pocket to find his bookbinding glasses where he’d tucked them earlier.

“What are you doing?” asked Troy.

“Have you ever seen a story being made into a book?” Abed slid off his regular glasses and positioned the smaller, darker pair on the bridge of his nose.

Troy leaned forward, face shining. “No.”

The story seemed to want to become a book. With no struggle, no fighting, no pinching, Abed stitched the story into the spine of a book cover to the rhythm of the deft strokes of his hand. Troy remained silent but for the barely-audible whistle of his breath as he watched. 

Abed held up the book, a sky-blue hardback a couple hundred pages thick.

“What’s the title?” Troy asked.

“Don’t know yet.” Abed slid the book across the table to Troy. “Read.”

It took Troy almost six hours to devour the book. Abed didn’t move for any of it. He wondered if Troy could feel Abed’s eyes on him as he read. He wondered if Troy would be annoyed. 

Abed tilted his head and blinked. He didn’t move.

~

Surrounded by starlight and stories, Troy sank into the knight and the maiden’s tale like a tired brain slipping into sleep. As he read, the knight took on a considerably more beanpolish shape than the words on the page might suggest. When the knight pushed up his visor, he had a tall, slightly hooked nose and round, dark eyes.

Troy reached the end of the story. He closed the book. A whole new universe whirled inside him, yet his body remained the same. How could it be?

“Well?” Abed prompted. “What did you think?”

“That...that was beautiful.”

“The story? Yes. I read it as I bound the book. It really was remarkable.”

“Not just the story,” Troy said. He didn’t know how to explain how he felt. “Abed, if I had consumed this story, this world and its characters and places and things and its magic, without this binding process, I would have died. I— I can feel it inside me, Abed.” Troy turned his shining eyes upon the librarian. “But what you do with these stories… You make it so that they can live inside me and—” Troy let out a short, barking laugh. “It’s wonderful.”

A rare smile graced Abed’s lips. He took off his bookbinding glasses and replaced them with his regular pair. The strong black frames complemented his sharp cheekbones and jawline.

“No one’s ever appreciated my work like this before,” Abed said. 

“That’s a damn shame,” Troy said softly. He ached to think of Abed, left alone for years at a time, surrounded by whole worlds in the form of books, with no one to admire his fine needlework or typography. 

“It’s not so bad,” said Abed.

Troy had come to Abed’s library every month for six years. Troy couldn’t do math, but he knew by heart that this amounted to seventy-two months. Seventy-two afternoons spent trading stories, seventy-two conversations, seventy-two hellos and goodbyes. And Troy had come to know when Abed was being sincere and when he was not. 

Troy also knew that if he pointed this out to Abed, the librarian would only grow hostile or more reserved. Instead, Troy placed his hand over Abed’s. The librarian’s slender hand felt so soft in Troy’s calloused one that Troy almost withdrew after a second. But he didn’t. 

“I hope it’s not. Especially when I’m around,” Troy said with a grin. 

Abed remained silent for a heartbeat, gaze fixed on their hands on the table. Then he turned his palm over and caught Troy’s fingers with his own.

“Especially when you’re around,” Abed repeated.

Troy’s heart lodged in his throat. He couldn’t speak as Abed’s dark eyes found his. The pads of his fingers fit so well in between the ridges of Abed’s knuckles and Troy could only focus on the sensation in that moment.

Like a key in a lock, Troy realized as Abed tugged him to his feet and out of the dark room. Their hands fit together like a key in a lock. And it had unlocked a piece of the puzzle inside Troy — a piece he’d sought for seventy-two months now.

Abed pulled Troy along, through the bookshelves. Troy stopped walking, dug his heels in. Abed looked back at him in question. 

Troy tightened his grip on Abed’s hand. He reeled Abed in close. Caught by surprise, the taller man blinked down at Troy. They’d stopped in the narrow aisle between two mahogany bookshelves and a galaxy’s edge spun through the stars outside the window. Their tiny flickering lights glittered in Abed’s irises. 

It was the last thing Troy saw before he slid a hand up to the nape of Abed’s neck, sank his fingers into the curls there, and pulled him down into a kiss.

~

Troy tasted of summer-sweet meadows and rain. He tasted of the magic that ran through the veins of the Wistorian earth. He tasted of raspberries and laughter and crackling wood and soft sleep. 

Troy tasted like a new home. And Abed could hardly get enough of it.

When Troy broke away for breath, Abed chased after his lips like a drunk licking at the last drops of ale in his tankard. Troy chuckled against Abed’s lips.

“Slow down,” Troy murmured. “I need to breathe.”

“Take your time,” Abed panted. His hands wound around Troy’s firm waist, traced the dip of his hips, trailed up to clutch at his ribs. He grew impatient again, though, and leaned down to capture Troy’s mouth again, tongue eagerly sliding between the seam of Troy’s lips.

“Abed,” Troy sighed between kisses. “Abed, God, this is…”

Abed trailed his kisses up Troy’s jaw and down his neck.

“ _Abed_ ,” Troy said again, like a prayer. Abed loved it. “Abed, yes… But— but, wait—”

“Yes?” Abed paused to search Troy’s face. The shorter man didn’t look displeased or alarmed — just a little confused.

“Where were you taking me?” Troy smiled. 

“What?”

Troy looked around. Abed noticed for the first time that they’d stopped in the middle of the Draconian Politics section. The Tiberian spiral galaxy wheeled outside. A smile tugged at the corners of Abed’s mouth.

“You kissed me and expected me not to get distracted?” Abed said.

“I didn’t really plan for it,” Troy said shyly, twisting his hands together behind his back. 

Abed couldn’t help dropping another kiss on Troy’s nose. “That’s okay.” He took Troy’s hand and started off through the library again.

“Will you not tell me where we’re going?” Troy asked.

“You seemed so in love with bookbinding,” Abed explained. “I’m going to show you how to do it. We’ll have to start small — poems, short stories, and the like, but I think you’ll find it very rewarding.” He had a few books on bookbinding stashed away in one of the corners somewhere.

“Yes...the bookbinding,” Troy muttered. He cleared his throat. “You make such quick work of it. I imagine it’d take me hours just to thread a needle, or…” He trailed off and halted.

“What is it?”

“Hours… Abed, how long have we been here? You know time gets wonkier the longer I stay outside of it…”

“Oh. That’s right.” A rock settled in Abed’s stomach. “You have to go.”

Troy pulled Abed against him again and looked up at him through his lashes. “Just so I can tend to my field in the morning.” He rocked upward and landed a peck on Abed’s mouth. “But I want it. I want you to teach me how to turn stories into books. I want to come back. I want…” Troy swallowed. “I want you.”

Abed licked his lips. “I want you, too.”

“You said we’ll have to start small with the books, right?” Troy drew back and reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out the ballad he’d bottled earlier on Wistor. “Will this do?”

Abed nodded.

Troy folded the small bottle into Abed’s hand. “This is a promise. Okay?”

Abed nodded again. The weight of Troy’s hands around his took away from the rock in his stomach a little bit.

When they reached the library’s front entrance, Troy paused to look back at Abed before he slipped out the door.

“I’ll see you soon, Abed.”

Abed put on a smile. 

“I know,” he said honestly. 


	2. epilogue

“It’s slipped out.”

“No, it’s still in there.”

“No, it only looks like it’s still in there.” Abed slid on his smoky-quartz glasses and tugged the almost-finished book closer. He inspected the loose stitch around the endband of the hardcover. He tutted. “Watch closely. Here’s how you fix a stitch like that…” 

When Abed finished, he looked up to find Troy smiling dopily at him. Abed’s cheeks heated. 

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” the librarian asked.

“Maybe,” said Troy. “I’m surprised you didn’t catch on. You know how skilled I am with my hands by now.”

“So, why would you mess up on purpose?”

Troy shrugged. He looped his arms around Abed’s midriff and hooked his chin over his shoulder. 

“I like watching you work,” Troy murmured into Abed’s ear. 

Abed cleared his throat.

“Anyway,” Troy continued, returning to his place beside Abed, “my first book, officially finished!” He held up the slim volume. “How’d I do? Are you proud of me?”

Abed smiled. “Why don’t you read it?”

Troy flipped the book open to the title page. Abed watched as the man’s gaze went slack.

“ _ The Farmer and the Librarian _ ,” Troy read aloud. He gaped at Abed. “But...how? I picked up this ballad in the woods that day with you—”

“That’s another thing I wanted to show you,” Abed said. “As the bookbinders who transform these stories into prose, we can take certain liberties with the material. This ballad was already a tale about a romance between two men not unlike us. I made a few tweaks here and there as I helped you work, and...I wanted to surprise you.” He smiled and spread his palms.

Troy’s eyes filled with tears. “Abed, I never cry, but—” 

“It’s okay,” Abed murmured, drawing Troy into his arms, still smiling. “You did amazing. I’ll shelve this soon, but not before we read through it together on your next visit.”

Troy sighed into Abed’s shoulder. “Right, I have to go soon.”

“But you’ll come back. You always do.”

Abed could feel Troy’s grin pressing through his shirt. 

“I love you,” said Troy.

Abed pressed a kiss onto Troy’s forehead. “I love you, too. Now, go, there are yet more stories to be planted and harvested and read.”

Troy squeezed Abed’s hand. “See you soon, love.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! if you liked it, kudos and comments are very much appreciated! <3  
> join me on tumblr @[sleepy-santiago](sleepy-santiago.tumblr.com) :)


End file.
